“MAD WOLF IN LUNAR WEB,
MAD CROW ON THE BEACH

A PLACE YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO
LAY SHADOW ON,
Seething in
white mist
its perennial
Nipp’d. Not for
But a violent storm
opened above us
like a flower
Maple.
You can taste a
Dubbed
to be spoken,
behind the fire-wall
Our hexed American
Refusal to size up
a crook
For what he is. Just a
Gone bushwhacking.
Ask old Mister
Strangeways what
Liminoid.
When you draw the
Wrong water you
Spill human blood and
No passing. An escadrille
Fishtailing in the blue,
the face of blue
Death staring up at
Not to grow fond

Death has done something
I’m done with fixing up
As it were a kindness
On the part of the world
What we have given it;
Slow fading and perfect
To rid the world of one more
While it passes over the
Death has done a thing
Death be damned
I spit at death
What you show
Shows at all times
Nothing but what life has
Shown you, life’s plagiarist.
Not strand of auburn,
not a freckle,
but as life’s gift.

The old
Dragon variation
I am skilled at
Wolf. Rayet
Who knows what that
Think it through
Lure of the ladyhair’s
Coma
Comet,
The cool apparition
Cold in its show
Of heat. But what’s hot
Live in the sparkling
Pushing full tilt to the
Peekaboo. It slides out
in the starlit surf
Din. Minions of the
Great Sleep say
Unstarred. Crow
Wing-walking my
way all the way to
Courage to find
through the amaze
Thread. It goes on
not if you don’t be
brave enough to
I am a fool
ed. Illusioned
ing. Fast to what
Sunlight creeps along
Shapes of the lovely
Hills and meadows
Park in morning,
Daisy, I love thee
Courage, no thing but
Courage. Blue
Scrub the
Mission for the
Moment’s on fire.
Going around afeard, well
Defies the dry
lake, the windy
sandy rivers
All supposal. We are
not I am worse off
for being hexed, in
love with Wildfire.
So most.
In slow motion,
Sure self-portrait
In mist, lost time,
A relic
Of all act and push-
Matter;
hop, track, grasp, exit;
unearth, dice, cook, exit;
burgle, array, speak, exit
prove, notch, imp, exit;
groan, off, sing, exit;
The thing’s horrid squeak.
To last forever after, all.
Because a shadow
careering
500 mph
still’s a shadow.
Quaked, too.
Because it can
turn into what
that it mocks.
How to get from
One day to the next
Without thinking.
So that the giant rock face
crumbles, the illusory
Spindrift, the rearing
Immelmans,
The rottening slow roll
Spinning in the creep
Comes to a grinding halt.”

--Mac Wellman, in: From the Other Side of the Century (ed. Messerli, 1994)

Listening to: Yes- Close to the Edge (I used to have on 8-track!)

"The occupations of my finger waves

The occupations of my finger waves.
I represent for years--for years--enough.
My people, in the channel, and a slave's.
And see the flabby devil in the cuff.

Six thousand to become aware of life.
Perhaps seen indistinctly lying curled.
And countless centuries begin a strife.
What notion in an ocean of the world.

Their glassy water, sparely peopled earth.
The colonel listened, interested at home.
It over, captain, as a mode of birth.
He echoed from within my honeycomb.

I spoke in this promotion an intrigue.
So infinitely greater than a league."

--Gnoetry (via MadInkBeard)

Listening to: Les Baxter- Moog Rock.

The Loeb Classics Page. (via Click Opera) --i sometimes think this is the ideal format for a book.(Powys was crazy about them too.)



"Do you know how hard it is to find a postcard without a confederate flag on it in Alabama?" --Vowel Movements



"A Cento from Ashbery"

The gray wastes of water surround
A great wind lifted these cardboard panels
To discover its heart. The blind enemy
One morning you appear at breakfast

To stunted memories, helping them stand alone
And cause, in the distance, an old satisfaction.
On the unassassinated president's desk
Behind a shutter, two black eyes are watching them.

08 10 04

'As in the case of the newspapers we had received, we did not believe anything we heard on the radio concerning military affairs or foreign relations. We considered that we were listening not to live broadcasts but to tapes made by the Americans, who had deleted or altered anything unfavorable to them... At one point, Kozuka remarked, "When you think of it, the Americans are really good at this, aren't they?" "Yes," I replied. "They have to take out anything they don't want heard and then rebroadcast it in almost no time. ...Just one slip, and the whole thing would sound fishy. I take off my hat to them. It must be very tricky work!" Later, when I found out that the broadcasts had not been faked, it occurred to me that it had been "very tricky work" indeed for us to read into the news broadcasts the meanings we wanted them to have.' --Onoda, op cit

'One difficulty with the Japanese language is that it has many words meaning "I" and "you", and they have to be chosen with care... In the Japanese army, the common words for "you" were kisama and omae, both of which can easily sound insulting if not used with caution. We dodged this problem by using the Tagalog words ako for "I" and ikao for "you". I tried very hard not to say anything that would make Kozuka angry, and he did the same toward me. ...our world had a population of two, both male...' --ibid

'If he [Suzuki] had not been wearing socks, I might have shot him. But he had on these thick woolen socks even though he was wearing rubber sandals. ...I came to the conclusion that the young man must really be Japanese.' --ibid

Virtual Ummah.

A Jazz Pflugelhornist from Nanaimo. (via NPR)

Sundazed is reissuing classic & obscure psychedelica--including some on heavy-gauge vinyl.

Matraquage.

Listening to- More Songs About Buildings and Food.

"A Cento from Southey"

Perils which threaten'd still, and arduous toil
Of clamorous joy re-ring: the rocks and hills
Relapsing now, and now again unclosed.
For peace is with the dead, and piety
Perverts the ordinance of God, and makes
The full orb'd moon, that beam'd around
Composed like one who sleeps with open eyes.

08 08 04

Why should the forms be privileged, that trigger a response of thing-recognition? Fleeting resemblances & partial illusions of depth accompany almost any well-tempered abstract image; ditto the penumbra of near-coherence for almost any nonlinear arrangement of words. And the need for metanarrative is met by fitting each work into a sequence of prior works that it happens to suggest. So i conclude in the end the only necessity for a mode called "realism", derives from the political will to maintain a monopoly on truthful art. Langpo, even at its most extreme, is no more unintelligible than the stylizations of ballet.

"BOWLED OVER

By kiss of death, bullet on brow,
No more life can overpower
That first infatuation, world cannot
Ever be harder or clearer or come
Closer than when it arrived there

Spinning its patched fields, churches
Trees where nightingales sang in broad daylight
And the vast flaring blue skirts of seas--
Then sudden insubordination
Of boredom and sleep

When the eyes could not find their keys
Or the neck remember what mother whispered
Or the body stand to its word.

Desertion in the face of a bullet!

Burial without honors."

--Ted Hughes

"In early 1974, an amiable Japanese university dropout named [Norio] Suzuki, who had tramped his way through some fifty countries, took it upon himself to make a journey through the Phillippines...he told his friends that he was going to look for Lieutenant Onoda, a panda and the Abominable Snowman, in that order. Presumably the panda and the Snowman are still waiting, because after only four days on Lubang, Suzuki found Onoda..." --translator's forward to No Surrender: My Thirty-year War by Hiroo Onoda (tr C Terry, 1974).

The Journey from the Center to the Page.

Joe Ahearn has a new book out, Five Fictions by Sulphur River Review Press.

Stomp proof bugs across from the end blog
A paranormal panorama cerise
With blog bling, askew

Pearly rook
Dark to write the times askew
Fathoms rook

The chronicles of cerise.
Dobry fatwa the arcane nacres
Of Aleppo rook

Pawn opening (shadow purposely askew);
Cars thick as leave flies up thick as thieves
Slag cerise

Who crave ore cerise
American torture nanoninja have
Shipshape egghead crow, merle, rook
In squamous atavistic pitch die askew

08 07 04